This was my 5 minute Lightening Talk at the Sentiments Analysis Symposium in NYC, April 13th #sas10

1. Sentiment Analysis
in Pharma
Sally Church, Ph.D

2. Understanding about how people feel about
their treatment and disease is critical
• PR tools give a big picture from media hits, but are less
useful for more granular analysis.
• Current buzz metric tools are useful for relative market
share of noise, but not for deep analysis.
• Traditional qualitative market research has limitations in
human analysis.
• Quantitative analysis for market segmentation is
expensive and usually based on physician rather than
patient sentiments.
• Rise of science, patient bloggers and social media as an
important mediums for evaluating sentiments means we
need new and better tools.

3. What is the basis of our approach?
• The underlying philosophy of the Leximancer
system is that meaning must be emergent from
text and therefore not biased by external pre-
definition.
• This has resulted in a methodology involving
identification of a Thesaurus of supporting
defining terms being 'bootstrapped' to an original
emergent seed-word, to form a Concept entity.
• It is a fully-automated discovery process using
the original text corpus.

4. Analysis can be from private recorded
interviews or public information on internet

5. Control panels allow a deeper analytical
framework to be applied by our analysts

6. Using a Thesaurus of words, +ve or -ve
associations can be established

7. The tool groups together word associations
to build a Concept Map

8. You can also drill down to specifics to look at
associations more carefully
Unfavourable
theme
showing
symptoms
and side
effects

9. We are now working with Pharma clients
using the tool in a number of different ways
Market Research:
• Qualitative interviews
• Segmentation
Sentiments can be:
• Unmet medical needs • Therapies
• Diseases
PR and Advocacy: • Companies
• Media Monitoring • Physicians or Patients
• Issues Management
• Social Media Outreach

10. sally@icarusconsultants.com
Icarus Consultants, Inc
O: 201 204 9210
T: 201 780 2778